The Gate Theatre presents the European premiere of David Finnigan’s Scenes from the Climate Era. Four performers take us through a dizzying series of vignettes, packed with humour and heart, all tackling the biggest story of our time. Directed by Atri Banerjee this is an unflinchingly raw, funny and honest look at how the conversations around the climate crisis shape our everyday lives, our communities and the biological world around us.
Scenes from the Climate Era runs at the Playground theatre on Tuesday 23 Sept to Sat 25 October. Tickets here: https://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/book-online/SCENESCLIMATE/
The play captures the dizzying range of climate conversations — what do you hope audiences will feel when they step into that whirlwind?
Atri Banerjee (AB): There’s a risk with theatre about the climate – or indeed, any theatre about any important “issue” – that it can feel a bit like you’re being asked to “eat your vegetables”. It’s going to be worthy, and important, but not necessarily that fun. I think it’s why people can sometimes turn off, and why theatre about climate change is hard to make.
What I hope is that audiences feel entertained by our show. It’s got a sly sense of humour and sometimes feels like a revue: you never stay with one conversation for too long, and instead you’re met with a great buffet of characters, settings, even theatrical styles. The show is intellectually rigorous but it appeals to the heart first and foremost. And existing in the whirlwind will be an exciting experience.
Humour sits alongside grief and despair in the piece — why was it important to include levity when tackling something as urgent as the climate crisis?
David Finnigan (DF): You know, I’m not sure I ever sat down and asked myself ‘what is important’ to include in this piece. I wanted to write about some of the wildest and most extraordinary stories currently unfolding in the climate space in the 2020s, the things that make my head spin and my eyes widen. And it happens that a lot of what is unfolding in the climate world is funny. Maybe because we’re humans, and we’re a fundamentally ridiculous species?
Theatre often thrives on intimacy and immediacy; how do you see it uniquely contributing to the public’s understanding of the climate emergency?
AB: We’re performing at the Playground Theatre to an audience of only 100 people each night. We’re all part of the show, each of us being asked to contribute to the conversation.
It’s going to feel very close up, both literally and emotionally. There’s a thesis in the play that what we need to survive is community, and the company and solidarity of other people. Being part of the audience for that embodies that idea.
In addition, people like Amitav Ghosh have theorised that the climate crisis is a crisis of the imagination. We haven’t been able to represent it properly, therefore we’ve failed to understand it.
As artists, though, our superpower is our imagination, and it’s important we correct this imbalance. Some of the solutions described in the play feel like dreaming up the impossible; but where better to dream up the impossible than a theatre?
The play is structured as a series of vignettes — what drew you to this form, and how does it reflect the fragmented way we process climate change?
DF: Large-scale environmental change doesn’t really have a protagonist, does it? Every time we narrow our gaze to focus on a single figure or group of characters, we inevitably close off a thousand other possible stories.
Letting go of a single overarching plot means you sacrifice something (a clear story arc) but you gain something in the scope and scale of the stories you can tell.
But this vignette form calls forth a whole other set of fascinating challenges. It’s less like putting together a 3-act narrative and more like assembling an album of songs. How do you shape the builds and drops in the album? Where do you increase intensity and where you do ease out and let things breathe? It’s a whole other task for a creative team, and it’s been really fascinating seeing Atri and the ensemble grapple with it.
For UK audiences, what new perspectives do you think this European premiere will bring compared to conversations already happening here?
DF: My very reductive perspective on the UK and European perspective on climate change is that people here have a very sophisticated understanding of the issues, and a rich language to speak about it with, but less direct experience of the impacts. There’s a lot of intellectual awareness but less embodied understanding of how it feels to live through, say, catastrophic floods, heatwaves or fires.
In other places I work (Australia, the Philippines, Nepal), I think people don’t have as much of a scientific understanding of the causes of climate change, but they understand at a very physical level what it means.
The consequence of all this knowledge without much lived experience, I think, is something like dread. People in the UK and Europe imagine climate change as this terrifying and abstract oncoming force which will transform their world. People in other parts of the world might fear climate impacts, but they don’t dread them in the same way, because you can’t dread something that’s already here.
I think dread can be a really paralysing emotion. And there’s something honestly freeing about knowing that we’re already in this thing, and here are the contours of that experience.
If we’re lucky, this play can take away a little dread and replace it with the bracing cold rush of familiarity. It’s already here. We’re already in it. Climate change isn’t new or strange or abstract, you already recognise it at a cellular level.
On a personal level, how has working on this project shifted the way you think about your own role in the climate conversation?
AB: I came to this play a novice when it comes to the complexities of the climate conversation. Working on this has been hugely educational for me, partly due to the research undertaken in preparing the play, but mostly because of the conversations and collaborations in the room; with David, with the actors, with my assistant director Grace.
It’s been a humbling experience, as well as eye-opening. I don’t know yet how it’s shifted the way I think about my own role – you may have to ask me again once the show opens! But it’s emboldened my feeling that artists can, in fact, contribute to understanding our new world; that we can help find new ways of living. Raymond Williams wrote that “to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”: that’s what the play does. I’ve been honoured to work on it.